Salon Wanderlust | "Pass the Butterworms"

"you cannot," the fundamentalist missionary complained, "get the Dani to wear clothes. They just won't do it." The first missionaries arrived in New Guinea's Grand Baliem Valley in 1959, anxious to convert the Stone Age tribesmen who live there. They've done all right, I suppose, these missionaries, but the question of clothing still devils the least flexible among them.

The fundamentalist sipped his tea. Aside from the "self-evident indecency" of human nakedness, he said, "it gets cold out here at night." And he posed a question to me, since I had been defending the Dani's right to dress (or not) as they pleased: "Why wouldn't a man wear clothes when it gets cold?"

It's not precisely true that the Dani go entirely naked. A few days earlier, in the village of Soroba, set hard against a great cliff of gray rock, Pua, the headman, had agreed to show me how the Dani men grow their clothes. Soroba was a horseshoe-shaped compound of a dozen huts thatched with straw.

Pua led me over a low wooden barrier designed to keep pigs out, and together we walked out behind the men's hut. There were 30 or 40 banana trees set against the rock wall, and nearby was a shaded area, trellised and overhung with leaves like a grape arbor. Yellow squash hung from the vines atop the trellis. The squash -- responding to the tug of gravity -- grew in a long, narrow fashion. The vegetables looked a bit like giant carrots. In time, Pua said, the men would pick the squash, cut off the thick end, scoop out the seeds, bake the husks lightly, dry them for a year, and then use the gourds as penis sheaths. The gourds are secured with a bit of bark twine tied around the waist. This is the extent of male adornment in the Grand Baliem Valley, where the polite salutation "How are they hanging?" is superfluous.

The valley, nearly 40 miles long by 10 miles wide, is located on the western, Indonesian half of the island of New Guinea. Carved out of lush tropical highlands by the glittering cocoa-colored Baliem River, the central valley is home to an estimated 100,000 Dani -- short, powerful people who formerly practiced ritual war to strengthen various life forces and to appease cranky ancestors.

The valley is nearly a mile high, which means the evenings are, as the missionary pointed out, quite cool. During my visit, I generally wore a light rain jacket after sunset. The indigenous Dani wore what they wore during the heat of the day: grass skirts for the women; gourds for the men.

The Dani wear gourds as a fashion statement -- a defiant affirmation of their own culture. Clothes are available to them at no cost. During a short-lived government push to clothe the Dani, for instance, headmen in each village were given shirts and slacks. It was thought that people would naturally see the manifest benefits involved in clothing: the dignity of pants; the elegance of cotton T-shirts (most of which had been collected in missionary clothing drives and featured slogans regarding Ninja Turtles and muscular men in masks who fly like bats).

The effort was largely a failed one.

In the valley's central town, Wamena, a government administrative center, it is rare to see a Dani out after dark. For example: Here it is, 55 degrees, drizzling, and some poor fellow, naked except for his gourd, is standing on the side of the road, alone, with his hands clasped behind his neck and his elbows down around his chest. It's a Dani attitude of abject misery, this posture. It says, "I'm freezing." It says, "I am, at this point in time, a completely forlorn individual."

A visitor in a rented vehicle feels a kind of obligation. He picks up the gentleman on the side of the road and drives him out along a dirt path 14 miles to the village of Soroba. The formerly forlorn Dani, whose name is Pua, invites his benefactor to dinner.

This is served in the long, rectangular cooking hut, where six different families are sitting around six different fires. It's warm inside the hut, and dry. Everyone is cooking the same thing: potatoes. The Dani are master agriculturists, and these aren't just any potatoes; they are the best-tasting potatoes grown on the face of the earth. They are huge, big enough to kill the cat if one rolled off a table, vaguely sweet and white as snow. The Dani grow 70 different varieties of potatoes and each kind tastes better than the last.

After dinner, everyone crawls out a low doorway and hustles through the rain, across the compound to another large, rectangular hut, where three fires are already blazing away. Family groups mingle and merge at the fires. Men sit fondly with their wives, children play, infants sleep soundly in their mothers' arms.

One man plays a kind of wooden jaw harp, modulating the sound with his tongue, with the shape of his mouth. And the rhythm suggests a song. The oldest of the women seems to be the choir director. She sings a verse, then a select few voices respond, and finally everyone joins in.

The songs are a delight, sweet or rousing or romantic, and favorites are repeated several times. At Soroba, they must do this a lot. There is a practiced harmony to the singing, a passion and a drama. Soon enough, the children are asleep. Some of the men have gone off to lie down with their wives in individual huts; others remove to the sacred men's hut for important talk.

The visitor is left to return to his rental car. He has a room, by himself, in a cheap hotel. There is no one at the hotel to sing with, and he misses his own family. The night, he thinks, has been a celebration of simple probity and virtue. Everyone had seemed so content. The visitor drives back through the chill rain, and there are no Dani anywhere. A man would be a fool to stand around naked on a night like this. Better to go home, sit comfortably around the fire, play with your children, sing the finest songs that you know and flirt with your wife.

An evening to think about when someone asks why the Dani would choose to go naked in the cold.

The missionary had been pondering the problem for some time. He thought it had to do with vestiges of paganism, with the sure and subtle influence of Satan.

I couldn't agree. You never see a Dani man standing on a Wamena street corner at midnight drinking cheap wine and saying "Hubba-hubba" to passing women. No, each evening's chill sends Dani people scurrying back to the warmth of hearth and home. Satan was pretty much frozen out of the equation. Going naked in the cold, as I saw it, was an expression of strong family values.
March 25, 1997

Acclaimed adventure writer Tim Cahill makes it his business to travel to remote and rarely visited lands, reporting his adventures with humor and panache in books such as "Jaguars Ripped My Flesh" and "Pecked to Death by Ducks." A resident of Livingston, Montana, Cahill is Outside magazine's editor at large and a contributing editor to Rolling Stone and Sports Afield.

W A N D E R L U S T

S A L O N    A R C H I V E S    N E W S L E T T E R    T A B L E   T A L K    M A R K E T P L A C E